by Rebecca Lim
‘Where … are we?’ Ryan slurs, feeling around for a chair and sitting heavily. ‘When my brain is … working again, you’ll have to tell me what the hell just happened. You have this way of making me … lose my grip on reality. Being with you is like being in a dream —’
‘You can’t wake from?’ I finish softly. ‘Welcome to my world.’
Ryan looks up at me for a moment, as if he’s imprinting my new face, my travelling face, upon his memory, or making his peace with it.
‘Ready?’ I say quietly. ‘We’ve got to keep moving.’
Ryan blinks, taking in the silent terrace around us, the overturned chair, his eyes widening as he spies the watching men gathered on the roofline opposite. ‘What are we still doing here!’ he exclaims. ‘Let’s go.’
There’s the sudden wail of an alarm being triggered, then the snick of a lock or bolt, a door opening.
I turn my head sharply to see a man in uniform emerging out of the curved structure of steel and glass behind Ryan. The young man is of average height, with a slight frame and receding jawline that makes him seem even younger. Beneath his peaked cap, he’s breathing heavily and nervously training a handgun on me.
Between us, there’s a sea of rain-speckled tables and chairs. He takes in our clothes, our builds, weighing us up. I get snatches of the panicky argument he’s running against himself in his head: thieves? he’s thinking. Or … terrorists?
Ryan stiffens as I murmur aloud, ‘They’re saying maybe the Galleria was a “terrorist attack”, he thinks we’re armed.’
This is some kind of high-end department store, I realise suddenly, getting a flash of the building’s interior as the man relives the heart-stopping moment he spotted us from the inside, through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
‘Police!’ he calls out shakily in Italian-accented English over the blare of the alarm. ‘Raise the hands.’
I feel his intense fear. He’s only a few months into this job, and he was supposed to go off duty in twenty-two minutes precisely until his commanding officer ordered him to respond to some nonsense from a bunch of priests about people on the roof. I skim all that out of the white noise in his head, and his name, too, because he’s yelling at himself in the third person. Humans are like radio transmitters; it’s hard to think with the air jammed so full of their noise. I know I should be afraid, but for the first time in a very long while, I feel an absolute calm.
‘Vincenzo,’ I say loudly, and the young man gives a start, goes pale, at the mention of his name. ‘You need to let us leave.’
His eyes widen and he shouts, ‘Impossible, signorina. Raise the hands.’
Without taking my eyes from Vincenzo’s face, I draw Ryan to his feet. The chair legs scrape a little as he straightens up and turns around slowly. Vincenzo’s expression flickers fearfully as he looks from me to Ryan, now standing side by side. We both have our backs to the barriers now.
Vincenzo moves closer. ‘There is nowhere to run,’ he says anxiously. ‘Raise the hands, or I will be forced to shoot you. Not to kill, you understand,’ he adds almost pleadingly, ‘only to wound.’
Still holding his gaze unwaveringly, I take another step backwards towards the head-high glass wall, the screen of trees behind it, one hand on the sleeve of Ryan’s leather jacket.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ryan mutters, sounding panicky. ‘He’s got a gun. You know what happened last time.’
‘What happened last time happened to Lela,’ I say fiercely. ‘It’s not going to happen to us. I need you to go with whatever I ask you to do. I need you to trust me.’
Before Ryan can reply, a burst of static issues out of a black device clipped to Vincenzo’s belt and I catch the word ‘localizzato’; located.
Vincenzo fumbles for the receiver, his gun hand wavering a little. While he’s distracted, Ryan and I keep inching backwards.
‘Not far now,’ I say. ‘When you feel the glass screen behind you, move right. Whatever you do, even if we’re separated, just aim for that corner.’ I see Ryan nod out of the corner of my eye. ‘Wait for me?’
Ryan’s eyes fly to mine, and I remember: wait for me were the last words I ever said to him when I was Lela.
A second man in uniform suddenly charges through the door Vincenzo left open. He’s stocky and tall, with a dark, even tan, massive shoulders and arms like sides of beef. One of his big, broad, black-gloved hands is wrapped around a semi-automatic identical to Vincenzo’s. He thrusts Vincenzo aside and snarls: ‘Get down! Get down! Or I shoot the boy first, and then I shoot you.’
I let the flow of his thoughts wash through me and I know he’ll do it. In his world, everything can be solved with guns, with beatings, with violence. He’ll take Ryan down first, because he’s bigger, more of a threat. Then me.
I feel Ryan’s fingers tighten around mine, his palm slick with apprehension. Something dangerous rises in me and I push Ryan back behind me, the fingers of my right hand still linked through his.
‘We’re leaving,’ I say loudly and slowly. ‘We don’t want any trouble. We’re just going to walk away and disappear. You won’t ever see us again.’
I feel Ryan pause for a moment before beginning to move slowly to the right between the glass screen and the outermost row of chairs and tables.
The second officer narrows his eyes, not bothering to reply. Then he points his gun up into the air and pulls the trigger. One shot, skyward. A flock of pigeons explodes upwards, scattering and wheeling in all directions. Even over the shrilling alarm, the gunshot is very loud and seems to reverberate in the air for the longest time. This place will soon be swarming in uniformed men.
‘Ryan!’ I say sharply, looking back at him. ‘Go!’
I see his unwillingness to leave me: it’s in his eyes, in the tense line of his body. Then he releases my fingers, bends low and sprints full tilt towards the eastern corner of the terrace without looking back. In that single, telling gesture is all of his faith in me.
I keep drifting slowly in the same direction, my eyes never leaving the faces of the two policemen, the gap between Ryan and me widening all the time, making myself the target.
‘Get down!’ the bigger one screams, his neck muscles cording, the ropy surface veins along his temples swelling with angry blood. He points his gun at Ryan’s fleeing figure, then at me, uncertain who to take aim at now. ‘Get down!’
From the peripheries of my sight, I catch the outline of my left hand … a flicker. As I raise it to my face, it begins to ache. An argent bloom moves over the skin, envelops the fingers, and that voice inside me, my inner demon, whispers: Cave. Beware.
The instant I raise my eyes to the second officer’s face, I register the tiny muscles around his eyes tighten, see the sudden flare of his nostrils, his lips go white. As my eyes widen in realisation of what he is about to do, he pulls the trigger — not to wound, but to kill — and the air in front of me seems to displace with the heat of a thousand suns.
Both men cry out, fall back. There’s a long, flaming broadsword in my left hand, its blade rippling with a pale blue luminescence. Giant, gleaming wings unfurl across my back, catching the light, intensifying it. As if the shot itself were a call to arms. I look down at my burning left hand upon the sword’s grip, study the elaborate pommel and cross-guards of its double-edged blade, uncertain if I can remember how to wield it. The sword weighs nothing at all, yet it is absolute power, a physical manifestation of my anger, indisputably mine.
As I gaze at its blazing hilt, I see the bullet enter my abdomen almost in slow motion, slicing neatly between two press-studs on the front of my black, goose-down jacket. The surface of my jacket seems to swallow the small, superheated projectile before growing smooth once more. The bullet leaves no trace, makes no impact upon me. But if I were the ordinary human girl he believes me to be, I’d be dead now, dead like Lela. I suffer a genuine moment of déjà vu, so terrible, so chilling, that I have to remind myself that this is a different time, a different place, alt
ogether.
I level the tip of my flaming sword blade at the man who shot me as if it were an extension of my arm. ‘On your knees!’ I roar, and my words ring with a sonic after-bite that causes the men to fall to the ground, dropping their weapons, clutching at their ears in agony.
‘Use violence against me again,’ I snarl, ‘and you will suffer violence.’
The sword vanishes into my palm, the shining wings dissipating with a shredding, swirling afterglow of energy. I turn towards Ryan and see the black-robed men on the Duomo roof lined up like gaping crows, their hands clasped before them as if in prayer.
I cover the distance to Ryan in seconds, and before he has time to speak, I slide an arm around him and take us up and over the barriers, over the edge of the terrace, across the entire breadth of the Via Santa Radegonda.
This time Ryan just yells in the kind of visceral terror that goes beyond words as I throw us almost blindly through space. We land badly on the rooftop adjacent to the department store, Ryan crying out as I skid over the edge of the stone railing, losing my footing, almost pitching us both headfirst onto the narrow, open walkway running along the front of the building.
As I haul him upright by the hem of his leather jacket, Ryan chokes, ‘Being with you is going to kill me!’
I don’t trust myself to answer; it’s the very thing I fear. I just touch his face reassuringly and keep moving, knowing he’ll follow.
There are loud sirens on the Piazza below, as if we have stirred up a nest of wasps that are now questing in our direction. The facade of the building we’re crossing is longer than the one we just left, and irregular. Looking back over one shoulder, I can no longer see the watchers on the Duomo roof. We’ve left the cathedral behind, as we’ve left behind the Duomo Square and its sea of milling officials, flashing lights and cordons.
I’m debating whether or not to just keep going across the rooftops of the city when Ryan passes me unsteadily, heading left around the corner of the building. Surprised, I swerve left, too, almost running into his back.
He turns to me, eyes wide and bloodshot, face pale from exertion. ‘There’s no way down from here,’ he mutters, a clear note of panic in his voice. ‘No way down. I can’t, Mercy, I’m not like you. I don’t think I can keep doing this.’
His eyes dart fearfully across to the next building, his sides heaving. I can see he’s reached some kind of physical limit. He’s only holding himself together, only submitting to the crazy things I’m putting him through, for me.
There were always more holes than plan, anyway.
I make my decision almost the instant I say gently, ‘There’s always a way down.’
Though I wish there were an easier way for me to return us quickly to solid ground, I pull Ryan to me tightly with my left arm, cover his mouth with my right hand, and take us up and over the edge of the roof. Down, down, into Via Agnello. I can feel him bellowing through my fingers as we plummet to earth, making no sound as we fall from the sky.
I count six floors on the way down. The windows we pass show rooms full of merchandise, mannequins, furniture, but are otherwise empty of life. It still isn’t opening time in central Milan, luckily for us. But in one hour, two at most, people will be clamouring to be let into the Duomo, the Piazza, into all of the surrounding shops and buildings that remain undamaged by fire, untrammelled by tragedy or death, because life goes on. It can do nothing else. We have to hurry.
The only person on the street below is a woman with a dark, wavy, shoulder-length bob, wearing a fashionable tweed overcoat, skinny jeans and slouchy tan boots, a striped tote bag on one shoulder. She’s heading away from us to the northwest, past a couple of parked cars pointed in the same direction. But as I land, I stumble against a stationary bicycle that’s been leant haphazardly against a parking sign located right by the wall. The commotion as it falls over causes the woman to turn and look at us. We’re clasping onto each other like drunks, Ryan and I, and she stares at us for a while, before turning and moving away again, slowly, jerkily. There’s something awkward about the way she walks, as if she’s in the grip of some kind of degenerative disorder, though she can’t be more than thirty, thirty-five.
I take my hand away from Ryan’s mouth and he starts yelling. ‘Don’t you ever —’ Then his shoulders sag and he mumbles, ‘“Don’t” isn’t really a word that applies to you, is it?’
‘It’s all new to me, too,’ I say softly into his exhausted face, ‘just having you here. Till now, it’s always been me fighting some impossible corner on my own. I’ve been battling my own set of major …’
‘Adjustment issues?’ Ryan mutters.
‘Something like that,’ I say ruefully. ‘You’ve noticed?’
‘And I thought it was the effect I was having on you.’ His laughter turns into a fit of coughing.
I shake him gently. ‘We’ll try and do things your way for a while, okay? We’re going to find you somewhere safe to rest.’
It starts off as an empty platitude, but then a tiny idea takes root in my head. It seems so outlandish at first that it couldn’t possibly work. But if it did? It could mean help for him and help for me. And I’m more than willing to take advice these days, provided it’s solid. I’ve been on my own for long enough.
Ryan shivers, weaving a little on the spot. ‘So cold,’ he says absently.
There’s a deserted underpass across the street, bisected by a zebra crossing; an empty bar beside it with a torn, maroon awning flapping a little in the breeze. Melted run-off thunders through subterranean pipes somewhere far below our feet. I look into the distance. Via Agnello, with its pizzerias and public car parks, cheap souvenir shops and menswear stores, didn’t look like this when I was last here. But I know with unerring certainty where we are and where we have to go. I point up the narrow, one-way street in the direction the woman is walking.
‘Think you can go just a little bit further?’ I say brightly.
I’m lying through my teeth, of course. We’re going to have to go the long way around to avoid the mess around the Galleria, but Ryan doesn’t need to know that. And we have to hustle. The streets around here are an illogical warren laid down over centuries, but people will still come looking for evidence of the crazy turisti who leapt off the terrace of one of the most prestigious department stores in town. They’ll be looking for body parts. It’s only a matter of time.
Ryan closes his eyes, and I feel him shivering uncontrollably inside his clothes. ‘You’re like some kind of learner archangel,’ he mutters. ‘Like that guy who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. That’s you. They could’ve been describing you.’
‘Free to bail,’ I remind him quietly.
He coughs a little as he opens his eyes and I see that they’ve grown unfocused. ‘Can’t,’ he slurs. ‘Can’t escape fate.’
I give him a shake, appalled at his words. ‘I’m not your fate, Ryan. I’m your choice. Remember that when everything is going to hell around us.’
I’m not sure if he can hear me any longer. I pull his arm across my shoulders again and we stagger forward, trailing that lone woman who shoulders her stripy tote as if it contains all of the sorrows of the world. I don’t get any sense of what she’s thinking, and I’m glad of it, because all I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste is Ryan’s bone-deep exhaustion. His eyes are fixed on the ground below his stumbling feet and he can’t stop shaking. If it weren’t for me, he would already have fallen. He needs things I can’t give him. We have to hurry, though doing things Ryan’s way — the human way — is always going to take longer.
I march him on ruthlessly while I warm his icy hands in mine. I describe all the buildings we’re passing in a low, cheerful voice while I scan the rooftops continuously for any hint of demonsign. Ryan eventually ceases to respond, and my sense of quiet desperation grows.
As we turn right into Via Ulrico Hoepli, I catch glimpses of faces and forms moving about at upper-storey windows. This late-rising city is beginning to stir. I get th
e sudden buzz of a middle-aged man in an elegant overcoat, scarf and suit exiting a coffee shop just across the street, something about the end of the world in his thoughts. Then I pick up the ambient thoughts of a couple of men wrangling a new armchair into a delivery van outside a furniture store we’re passing. They hate each other, hate the armchair, and can’t understand why, after everything that’s happened in this city, they still have to deliver it. Today.
I turn left up Via San Paolo, with Ryan braced tightly against me, his every footstep dragging. As we move along the upper edge of the Piazza della Scala, I begin to pick up a tangle of human energy: thoughts expressed in a multitude of languages, emotions that grow louder and more insistent the closer we get, amplifying in timbre, volume and complexity, all the time.
Then I see the crowd of shouting people gathered around a police roadblock at the southern end of the square, a larger crowd milling around another roadblock on the western side.
Something else across the square makes me freeze in my tracks. Ryan sways against me, exhausted, his fringe of straight, dark hair falling forward over his eyes, body on autopilot. I’m staring directly at the northern face of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the building we’ve been trying so hard to go around. Two banners hang one on either side of the giant archway that serves as an alternative entry point to the vast shopping arcade. The left banner is badly damaged; you can barely make out the playful model with the striking eyes and sky-high beehive wearing an evening gown from the 1960s in Giovanni Re’s signature red, rosso Re. But the right banner is largely intact, and I stare at the mesmerisingly powerful image of a warrior-sorceress with her burnt caramel-coloured hair wild and loose, wearing a long, flowing gown of molten gold, her hands wrapped around the pommel of a bejewelled sword. I gaze into Irina Zhivanevskaya’s huge, smoky, smouldering eyes and feel for a disorienting moment as if I’m staring into a giant mirror, so recently have I fled her body.
